Gillespie, Dizzy

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Gillespie, Dizzy

October 21, 1917
January 6, 1993

John Birks Gillespie, or "Dizzy," as he was later known, was born in Cheraw, South Carolina. He took up the trombone in his early teens and began playing the trumpet shortly thereafter. When he began to play the trumpet, he puffed out his cheeks, a technical mistake that later became his visual trademark. Starting in 1932, Gillespie studied harmony and theory at Laurinburg Institute, in Laurinburg, North Carolina, but in 1935 he broke off studies to move with his family to Philadelphia. The bandleader Frank Fairfax gave Gillespie his first important work, and it was in Fairfax's band that Gillespie earned his nickname, Dizzy, for his clowning onstage and off.

In 1937 Gillespie moved to New York and played for two years with Teddy Hill's band. Through the early 1940s his experience was mostly with big bands, including those of Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Carter, Charlie Barnet, Les Hite, Lucky Millinder, Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, and Billy Eckstine. Among his important early recordings were "Pickin' the Cabbage" (1940) with Calloway and "Little John Special" (1942) with Millinder. Gillespie married Lorraine Willis in 1940, and he began leading small ensembles in Philadelphia and New York shortly thereafter. In 1945 he joined with saxophonist Charlie Parker (1920–1955) to lead a bebop ensemble that helped inaugurate the modern jazz era.

Although younger jazz musicians had played in a bebop style in the early 1940s in big bands and in afterhours jam sessions at clubs in Harlem, it was not until Parker and Gillespie's 1945 recordings, including "Dizzy Atmosphere," "Shaw 'Nuff," and "Groovin' High," that the new style's break from swing became clear. Bebop reacted to the sometimes stodgy tempos of the big bands and was instead characterized by adventurous harmonies and knotty, fast lines played in stunning unison by Gillespie and Parker, with solos that emphasized speed, subtlety, and wit.

Gillespie's trumpet style during this time was enormously influential. By the mid-1940s he had broken away from his earlier emulation of Roy Eldridge (1911–1989) and arrived at a style of his own, one which he maintained for the next five decades. He had a crackling tone, and his endless flow of nimble ideas included astonishing runs and leaps into the instrument's highest registers. Although many of Gillespie's tunes were little more than phrases arrived at spontaneously with Parker, Gillespie composed many songs during this time that later became jazz standards,

including "A Night in Tunisia" (1942), "Salt Peanuts" (1942), and "Woody 'n' You" (1943). In addition to his virtuosity on trumpet, Gillespie continued to display his masterful sense of humor and instinct for gleeful mis-chief. Starting in the mid-1940s he affected the role of the jazz intellectual, wearing a beret, horn-rimmed glasses, and a goatee. He popularized bebop slang and served as the hipster patriarch to the white beatniks.

After his initial successes with Parker in the mid-1940s, Gillespie went on to enormous success as the leader of his own big band, for which he hired Tadd Dameron, George Russell, Gil Fuller, and John Lewis as composers and arrangers. Some of the band's recordings include "Things to Come" (1946), "One Bass Hit" (1946), and "Our Delight" (1946). The band's celebrated appearance at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, France, in 1948, yielded recordings of "'Round about Midnight," "I Can't Get Started," and "Good Bait." This appearance included the Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo, and during this time Gillespie began to explore Afro-Cuban rhythms and melodies. Gillespie's composition "Manteca" (1947) and his performance of George Russell's "Cubana Be, Cubana Bop" (1947) were among the first successful integrations of jazz and Latin music, followed later by his composition "Con Alma" (1957). In the late 1940s and early 1950s Gillespie also continued to work on small-group dates, including reunions with Charlie Parker in 1950, 1951, and 1953 and a return to the Salle Pleyel as a leader in 1953.

Although Gillespie never lost his idiosyncratic charm and sense of humor—after 1953 he played a trumpet with an upturned bell, supposedly the result of someone having bent the instrument by sitting on it—he outgrew the role of practical joker and instead became a figure of respect and genial authority. He released "Love Me" and "Tin Tin Deo" in 1951 on his own short-lived Dee Gee record label, and he became a featured soloist on many performances by the popular traveling sessions known as Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP). In 1956 Gillespie's integrated band became the first to tour overseas under the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department, and in the following years he took the band on tours to the Middle East, South America, and Europe. In 1959 Gillespie, always an outspoken opponent of segregation, performed at the first integrated concert in a public school in his hometown of Cheraw, South Carolina. The next year he refused to back down when Tulane University in New Orleans threatened to cancel a concert unless he replaced his white pianist with an African American. Gillespie's political activities took another twist in 1964 when he went along with a tongue-in-cheek presidential campaign. During this time Gillespie continued to record, both with small groups (Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac, 1967) and with big bands (Reunion Big Band, 1968). He also worked extensively in film and television.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Gillespie maintained his busy schedule of touring and recording both in the United States and abroad as a leader of small and large bands and as a guest soloist. He appeared with the Giants of Jazz tour (1971-1972) and recorded with Mary Lou Williams (1971), Machito (1975), Count Basie (1977), Mongo Santamaria (1980), Max Roach (1989), and often with his trumpet protégé, John Faddis (b. 1953). During this time he also appeared on television shows such as Sesame Street and The Cosby Show. In 1979 he published his autobiography, To BE or Not to BOP, in which he explained his longstanding interest in Africa, which influenced his politics, music, and style of dress, and also recounted his involvement in the Bahá'í faith, to which he had converted in the late 1960s.

By the late 1980s Gillespie had long been recognized as one of the founding figures of modern jazz. In 1989 he won the U.S. National Medal of the Arts and was made a French Commandeur d'Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Although his instrumental style was largely fixed by the mid-1940s, he won four Grammy Awards in the 1970s and 1980s, and his career as a trumpeter ranked in influence and popularity with Louis Armstrong (1901–1971) and Miles Davis (1926–1991); along with Armstrong he became jazz's unofficial ambassador and personification around the world. Gillespie, who lived in Queens, New York, and then in Camden, New Jersey, continued giving hundreds of concerts each year in dozens of countries until his death at the age of seventy-four.

See also Davis, Miles; Jazz; Parker, Charlie